Google Expands Its Google Translate Services

Google Translate on Android adds 16 more languages for its camera input feature, while Google's Web-based Translate service adds five languages.

Google is again expanding the number of languages that can be translated using its Android mobile and Web-based tools, making it easier for Web users to understand the information they find, even if it's in a foreign language.
Google Translate for Android has added 16 more languages to its camera-input feature, which allows users to take a photo of a sign in a foreign language so it can be translated. The performance of the camera-input feature has also been improved, according to a May 8 post by Minqi Jiang, associate product manager of the Google Translate Team, on the Google Translate Blog.
Another improvement, wrote Jiang, is that users can now save their favorite translated phrases to a phrasebook in their Android devices so they can easily call them up again when needed. "Whether it's 'Where can I find a museum?' or 'Do you know where the bathroom is?' Google Translate lets you save these translations in your Phrasebook," Jiang wrote.
In the past, users could not easily access those saved translations on the go from their smartphones or tablets, but that capability is now available, according to Jiang.

"To get started, select Phrasebook in the app menu of the Google Translate app for Android," he wrote. "To sync your phrases, simply sign in to your Google Account by tapping the 'Sign in' button at the top of your Phrasebook."

The 16 new languages that will work with the camera-input feature are Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish.
The Google Translate feature for Web-based users has also been updated with five additional languages that can now be translated by the service, according to a May 8 post on the Google Inside Search Blog by Sveta Kelman, program manager for Google Translate.
The additional languages are Bosnian, Cebuano, Hmong, Javanese and Marathi. Bosnian is an official language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Cebuano is one of the languages spoken in the Philippines, according to the post. Hmong is spoken in many countries across the world, including China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and throughout the United States, while Javanese is the second most-spoken language in Indonesia, according to Kelman. Marathi is spoken in India. Google Translate already supports several other Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.